Thursday 23 June 2022, 8pm
Delighted to host a launch event for Anthony Joseph's new poetry collection, Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry, 9 June), a book of reimagined sonnets, remixing the form in a set of elegies for his father that commemorate and interrogate their complex relationship, while examining the wider edges of Caribbean masculinity and fatherhood, absence, loss and longing.
Using his form, the calypso sonnet, a politically invested line length, Joseph enforces a melodic rhythm which reminds him of his father and favours a decidedly Afro-Caribbean approach.
Anthony Joseph will discuss Sonnets for Albert with writer and performer, Hannah Silva, followed by a music-accompanied reading with Jason Yarde (alto & soprano saxophones) and Richard Ólátundé Baker (percussion).
‘An absolutely brilliant writer’ – Benjamin Zephaniah
‘An exceptional talent’ – Blake Morrison
Anthony Joseph FRSL is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and long listed for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His most recent publication is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamblyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry.
